Arizona
by staphylococci
Summary: "You had an X-ray?" Fang looked incredulous. I nodded. "Details later." - A missing moment from The Angel Experiment: Max tells Fang she was shot in Arizona. Implied Max/Fang consistent with their relationship in the first novel. One-shot.


A/N: This missing moment takes place in TAE right after chapter 66, but also right before 67. Max and the flock have just rescued Angel and have decided to head out to NYC. There's no indication of how long it takes them to get from Death Valley to NYC, but I'd assume after escaping the School they would've taken a night to fuel up and crash.

The inspiration for this fic comes from pg 166 of TAE:

 _Jaws dropped. Everyone stared at me in horror._

" _You had an X-ray?" Fang looked incredulous._

 _I nodded. "Details later. …"_

Here are those details!

* * *

ARIZONA

Despite hating being on the run, I really enjoyed the late nights in the desert.

We had found an isolated perch in the Grand Canyon to crash in for the night. It had been perhaps the longest day in a series of long days (in reality, a _lifetime_ of long days), so the kids went down immediately. Iggy had hung around with Fang and me until fairly late as we discussed a future game plan and tried feebly to make each other laugh in some sort of fractured attempt to feel normal again. Eventually, he dragged himself to our makeshift campsite to sleep. He cited having second watch as his reasoning, but I knew just by looking at him that he was dog tired.

I sat cross-legged at the lip of the canyon, marveling at the endless sky above me and the jagged valleys below me. The full moon shone like a giant overhead light. I took a deep breath, felt my lungs expand, and then released it. Another day in the books. All six of us alive and well.

Fang appeared next to me, stretching his long legs in front of him as he sat and dropped a bag in between us. When I squinted at it, he pushed it toward me.

I glanced down and let out a very un-Maxlike squeal.

Fang gave me a half-amused look, but I couldn't care. " _Chocolate_?" I crammed my hand into the bag and pulled out a fistful of M&Ms, funneling them unforgivingly into my mouth. "How long have you been holding out on me?"

"Depends," he said, staring straight ahead, not meeting my eyes. "How long were you going to hold out on telling me you got shot?"

My hand froze halfway to my mouth. Suddenly, I wasn't hungry anymore. I knew the color was draining from my face. I studied Fang's profile and scrambled for words.

"What are you talking about?"

It was a terrible attempt at a cover, but it was more on principle than anything else. Of course he was going to find out sooner or later, but it was supposed be on my own terms.

Without missing a beat, Fang's hand whipped out to push gently on my shoulder and I sucked in a deep breath and winced. _Ow._

He gave me an angry, pointed look, and I knew I was screwed.

"How did you know?" I demanded.

He snorted bitterly. "Well, you're a pathetic liar, for one."

I glowered at him.

"You're favoring that shoulder," he added. "I knew you weren't attacked by Erasers, because you would've told us. You would've needed to be seriously injured to need an x-ray, and the only way a _non-_ Eraser could do that would be with a gun."

"So you guessed."

"I _knew_. Because I know _you_."

"Oh, please."

"Let me guess. The girl was being harassed, you jumped in to save the day, and by the time you realized you were in way over your head, it was already too late."

I was furious, both at what he was saying and the fact that he was right. "What was I supposed to do, Fang? They could've hurt her, or raped her, or killed her—"

"I'm not saying you did the wrong thing, Max. But you need to have better self-preservation skills."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Would you quit acting like I'm insulting you?" he said sharply. "You love an underdog. That's great. You are intrinsically compelled to do good, to help people. Not a bad thing. But what if they'd aimed a little lower and clipped your heart? Or went for a headshot? You act like you're invincible."

"I do not," I huffed.

Fang raised an eyebrow.

"I don't!"

"A few days ago. When they took Angel."

I dangled from a helicopter with no concern for my own life before falling to the rocky Colorado ground.

"It was _Angel._ "

Fang rolled his eyes. "When Iggy lost his eyesight at the School?"

I'd slammed into my dog crate so hard that it fell to the ground and busted open. Then I'd barreled down the hall and tackled the first whitecoat I saw, earning me a broken arm, a black eye, and more intramuscular sedatives than anyone could ever want. We were also upgraded to wrought-iron cages.

"It was _Iggy,_ " I responded.

He didn't speak for a moment, seeming to weigh what he was going to say.

When he finally did, it was quiet, almost tentative. "When they wanted to study Nudge's reproductive system?"

I'd screamed and hollered and kicked and bitten until they'd taken me again instead. And then I never spoke of it to anyone, not Nudge, not Fang, not even Jeb.

Rage bubbled in my chest. I could not believe he'd brought that up. "Guess what— _it was Nudge!_ And I would do any of it—anything at all—for you or Gazzy or any of the others a million times over."

Fang rose silently and retreated to the camp site, returning with his backpack. He unzipped the front pocket and pulled out the first aid supplies, gesturing toward my shoulder with his chin.

"Let me see it," he said in his no-nonsense tone.

I was seething, but I knew he'd force me to show him eventually. Plus, I needed to make sure it wasn't getting infected.

I struggled to unzip my sweatshirt. His gentle hands took over and then pulled down the shoulder of my t-shirt so he could inspect the gauze. He peeled it back ever so slightly and gritted his teeth a fraction when he saw it. An angry exhale slipped from his lips.

"A _shotgun,_ Max?"

"Give the man a prize," I muttered.

Though he had his emotions protected behind an imperturbable mask, it was obvious he wasn't entertained. His jaw was clenched, his eyes were too tight. He pulled the soiled gauze off my shoulder and sprayed the wound with antiseptic. I winced.

Instead of chastising me further, or telling me I was an idiot, what came out his mouth as he redressed my shoulder was, "Do you know what they say on airplanes?"

That replaced all the anger with total confusion. I flinched again as he started taping my shoulder up. " _What?_ "

"If there's a change in cabin pressure, put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your kid," he said, dark eyes boring into me. "You can't protect any of them if you're dead."

"Well, good thing I'm not _dead_ , then," I mumbled.

Fang growled and dragged a hand through his hair, abandoning his first aid work and rising to his feet in front of me. "You were obviously hurting enough to look for help. I mean, Jesus, Max, a hospital?"

I shot to my feet, too. I tried to get in his face, but he'd grown so much that I was only eye level with his chin. The soreness in my shoulder was gone, replaced only by cold, hard ire. "For your _information,_ I did _not_ go to a _hospital_!" I said as harshly as I could without waking the others. "I—"

Fang glared down at me, daring me to speak.

What was I supposed to say? _I met a girl—a regular girl—and her mom; her incredible, loving mom, who cleaned my wound and defended me and broke the rules for me and taught me how to bake cookies…_

I swallowed my anger and, all at once, felt incredibly defeated. I dropped my gaze and took a shuddering, shaky breath in, not caring if Fang was angry, not caring that I'd been shot, not caring that we were on the run.

We had nowhere to live. We were hiding from people who would never stop chasing us. We had no money, no identities, no one to help us or guide us.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn't feel like I could do this leader thing anymore.

"The girl I helped. Ella. I somehow ended up in her backyard. Her mom is a vet and said she could help me. She took me to her work and did an x-ray so she could make sure there wasn't any serious damage. There wasn't, just muscular, she said. But then she found this chip—a microchip—in my arm. Like the kind they put in dogs to track them, she said."

Fang said nothing.

I sank back to the ground, staring out at the inky sky before me. I picked the dimmest, most isolated star I could find and studied where it sat against the ebony expanse. And that was exactly how I felt. Alone in a sea of infinity.

Fang sat back down next to me and didn't talk for a long time. He leaned his warm shoulder against mine and let me compose myself. One of his hands brushed my knee, which was about as touchy-feely-supportive as Fang got these days.

I scrubbed my face with my palms and let out another deep breath, forcing myself to pull it the heck together and not scream in frustration.

"And?" Fang said.

"And _what?_ " I spat. "And I'm a mutant freak with a bullet wound and no hope for a normal life."

A pause.

"They were nice, weren't they?"

I swallowed, considering the quiet, gentle hum of his voice, the weight of his question. I turned to face him, but he stared forward. "Yeah," I whispered back. "They were."

"And you wished you could stay. Live a normal life. No School, no Dumpster diving, no Erasers. No experiments. No nightmares or flashbacks."

I didn't need to acknowledge him; he knew he was right. He could read it in my face. My body language. Growing up, there had been times that I wondered if Fang too had a bit of the mind-reading skill that Angel had, but it was just how well he knew me on top of how observant and calculating he was.

He continued in that low, tender voice, but this time met my eyes. "You wished for a do-over. No wings. No flock."

Only he could cut to the heart of the matter like that, slice right through me with his words. I'd have denied it vehemently to any of the others. I'd have said I'd never entertained the idea of that thought once, ever.

But the truth was that I _had._ For one fleeting, horrifying moment, I had thought it: what if this was my reality? What if I'd never had wings, or been imprisoned and tortured? What if, instead, I'd had a loving mother who baked cookies, a normal sister that stole my clothes and drove me insane, but who I loved with all my heart? What if we had a pet dog named Magnolia and a home and a life and spent Christmas together?

What if I'd never met, never mothered, never _loved_ the flock?

And it had scared the crap out of me, if only because for one moment, I had wanted it—the white picket fence, the family, the normalcy. Not a group of haunted children looking to me for guidance during their desperate lives.

And then I'd hovered over the toilet for a half an hour trying not to throw up over the fact that I thought it.

Fang's eyes were just as dark, just as vast, just as full of possibility as the sky that surrounded us. But peering into them, I felt remarkably less alone.

"You're not fooling yourself. You'd choose us every time. They know that. _I_ know that. And you know it. But sometimes, just to imagine a different life…" He broke eye contact and started back out at the canyon, expression tight.

I'll admit it—my jaw dropped. I closed it immediately, but the damage had been done—the corner of Fang's mouth rose and he turned back to look at me.

"What?"

"Nothing," I said quickly.

Get this—he actually laughed. Over the years, Fang had laughed with me a lot—never the others—but it was such a rarity, and during such a tense conversation, that my jaw dropped again.

"What?" he said playfully, an emotion so foreign on his voice that he almost sounded like a stranger. "Stoic, imperturbable Fang admits sometimes he wishes he wasn't a mutant freak?"

I chuckled in response and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."

"You refuse to recognize that the things you feel—the things you consider 'bad' or 'weak'—those are _normal_ emotions." He shook his head. "It's impossible for one person to keep it together all the time."

"You seem to do it pretty well," I accused.

Fang give me an incredibly flat gaze back. "This is what you consider 'having my act together?'" he said, pointing to himself. "I keep everything at a distance. You think I could mother them the way you do? Make them feel loved and protected the way that you do?"

"If you had to, yes," I said.

Fang shook his head. "You spend so much time being hard on yourself for being weak, when in reality your weakness is the ninety-eight percent of fourteen-year-old girl in you. What you're _supposed_ to be. The one that wishes she had a family and concert tickets to see a boyband."

I opened my mouth to speak, but he shook his head again.

"You don't have to deal with it all alone," he said. "You're allowed to need help. You're allowed to break down sometimes. You have people to help you."

I knew this was his way of telling me "I love you, man," of telling me he was my second-in-command, without using any even remotely mushy words. I also knew it was the end of the conversation.

We sat in comfortable silence for a while. I felt myself finally, finally, finally unwind enough to be tired, enough to consider curling up next to Angel and counting my very few blessings.

"You would've been one of those terrible snotty girls," Fang said finally with a mischievous grin.

"Yuck," I said, making a face. "Like a cheerleader?"

Fang snorted.

"What?" I said, shoving him. "I'm not pretty or girly enough to be a cheerleader?"

"You're five-eight," Fang said. "If they threw you in the air, you'd go straight through the ceiling. I was thinking more soccer star."

"Well, you'd've been the creepy kid that sits alone in art class," I shot back.

Fang laughed again. "I like to think I'd be a little bit more well-adjusted if I wasn't raised in a dog crate by twisted scientists."

That shut me up again.

The six of us had been subjected to unimaginable horrors from birth. I still rocked Angel to sleep most nights a week in an attempt to protect her from the memories that wracked her powerful mind.

As the eldest of each of our gender in the experiment group, Fang and I had experienced further, even more demented horrors; from studies about our reproductive systems to ones about our strength and speed to others about our ability to form friendships.

Fang and I had seen each other injured and tortured more often than we could count, mostly due to an early experiment regarding the capability of empathy and relationship-forming in us hybrids. This was for overarching research regarding our "humanity" and whether or not we'd sustained it despite our avian genes.

Spoiler alert: we did. Not so much in spite of our bird genes, but more in spite of the environment of inhumanity we'd dealt with.

For a short time during some of my earliest years of life, I thought I was unable to speak, only scream—because I'd screamed myself hoarse so many times watching Fang be tortured in the name of science that my throat physically hurt when I tried to communicate in any other way.

Because I was a few months older, because I more vocal, because I was the least cooperative, I experienced even more horrors than Fang. Ones that I only knew of because Jeb told me when I turned twelve, feeling I was old enough to know the truth.

My mind had rewired to forget those experiments, but my subconscious could not hide—as a result, the nights I did not spend rocking Angel to sleep, Fang spent on my floor. It was a silent agreement we'd never spoken of. And it was the only way I ever slept.

I'd never considered that Fang's quietness, his affinity for the color black, his stoicism, were due to the darkness in him from our childhood. Just like I'd never considered that my stubbornness, my paranoia, my maternal instincts, my inability to _not_ fight, were due to the even deeper darkness in _me_ —the innate understanding that nothing else could sustain me, it was truly me against the world.

"What are you so deep in thought about?" Fang said, breaking me from my reverie.

I shook my head, finding my words. "I'm sorry for splitting off. Getting shot. It was a stupid move."

"You'll do it again," Fang said in a defeated sort of voice. "You can't apologize for who you are." His face was back to an unrevealing mask, and I sighed, knowing the tender moment had passed.

"Take third watch," Fang said after a while. I turned to see him studying me; I knew my eyelids had been drooping and had no energy to argue with him in my own feeble defense. "I'm wide awake. I'll take it from here."

I stood up and brushed the back of my pants off, feeling the weight of the day crash down on me.

"Thanks for doing my shoulder," I said, voice thick with sleep. "Feels a lot better."

Fang nodded once and stuck his fist out. I stacked mine and tapped the back of his hand. He did the same to me.

"Goodnight," I said as I retreated to the campsite. I had just curled myself around Angel's battered, sleeping form when I heard him respond, so quietly that I'm sure he didn't think I could hear the sadness and tenderness and _something else_ in his voice.

"Goodnight, Max."

* * *

A/N: I randomly established a ton of backstory in this one-shot; I went to delete a lot of it because I didn't think it contributed to the overall point of the story, but then it inspired me for a plot for my newest multi-chapter fic. So consider this a sneak peek. :)


End file.
